I don’t want to sound like a cranky old man. But if jokes can be inspired by things that are wrong, unjust, or stupid, then they can surely inspire blog posts.

Nonetheless, I’m still going to refer to some shitty edgelord comedy. I’ve seen a lot of it lately, due in part to it’s prevalence in the local scene, and partially to some of the political conditions in the world right now.

One of those conditions I’m referring to is the resurrected bullshit narrative about the rise of Pauline Hanson and her One Notion party. Everyone’s talking about an isolated and statistically insignificant brief spike in her “popularity” and trying to create some kind of buzz that she might actually have the Prime Minister position in her sights.

If this was even remotely likely, I’d be troubled, but I’ve seen this shit before. Every decade or so her stupid fans try to talk this dream into reality. But I put the word “popularity” in quotes because even on her absolute best day she and her racist supporters are still a tiny minority – which is pretty ironic when you consider that hating on minorities is their thing.

There’s no nice way to say it. She’s a self-serving grifter who’s managed to extract a luxury politician’s wage and perks out of the national budget for more than three decades without ever serving Australia even a little bit. In fact she seems to actively work against the nation’s interests. She’s consistently voted against Aussie battlers. That’s a matter of public record, but her stupid fans somehow think she represents them. Fact-checking really isn’t their thing.

And yes, I said stupid. After over thirty years I’ve concluded that there really is no nice way to say it. If you’re offended by that, have you considered not being a fucking idiot?

The shitty stand-up routine that inspired this post came from one of those supporters. I know this comic is a supporter because 18 months ago he uploaded a song to YouTube that praises her and whines about immigrants taking jobs from workers. He made the song with an AI program. Making a song about immigrants taking people’s jobs with an AI program is pretty ironic, don’t you think?

I’ve always been perplexed when I tackle the topic because he is also an immigrant. Ironic, yes? Anyway, you’d think that having been through the process, he might know how incredibly incorrect all of his claims are, but somehow this is not the case.

The routine is presented “in character” which in this case means a narrative with a problematic accent. So we get a stereotype-ridden spiel about “curry munchers” working in call centers, claiming the ALP has imported thousands of immigrants so they’d all vote for the ALP out of gratitude or obligation and keep the ALP in power forever, claiming they can all easily get on the NDIS just by “identifying as having a disability” and then get ten thousand dollars a week of NDIS money and live on easy street while Aussie battlers struggle.

There’s more but I’ll spare you the whole play-by-play. At the end, he gives us a short speech about how we shouldn’t be offended because it’s comedy that just happens to have some truth in it. Out of all the racist crap, that final condescending line was the bit that I took offense at.

I thought, “Wrong. And wrong. You just lied twice in the same sentence.”

See, that wasn’t comedy. And there was absolutely no fucking truth hiding in there. I’m going to explain both of these points.

First, it wasn’t comedy. Now, before you @ me with some bullshit about how it’s still funny even if I didn’t like it or laugh at it, I fucking know. If you think you’re going to correct me on that point, save your fucking breath and put your bullshit straw man argument away. That’s not the claim I’m going to make.

There’s heaps of offensive, awful and unfunny shit that’s still comedy even if I don’t like it. That’s absolutely fine. But most shitty comedians and their fans tend to conflate two ideas that are not the same.

Yes, funny is subjective. You don’t have to tell me that we all laugh at different stuff and my reluctance to engage don’t make something unfunny,

But jokes are objective. That’s the thing that the “comedy is subjective” guys all tend to forget. Jokes have structural and intentional attributes that define them as jokes. There are bad jokes, utterances that fail to make anyone laugh but are still technically jokes. When people use the “it was a joke” defense it’s valid if the offending remark has the structure of a joke. More often than not, this is not the case and they’re merely claiming they thought it was funny.

Funny is subjective. Jokes are objective. Not all jokes are funny, and not all funny things are jokes.

I know I sound pedantic about this, but it’s a simple important concept that comedians really need to understand.

So when this guy says “It’s comedy,” I immediately run it through my ‘Is it a joke? Does it have the structure and elements of a joke?’ filter. And no, it’s not comedy. You can’t turn statements into jokes just by saying them in an offensive accent.

Now let’s look at the second part of that statement, that there was some truth in it. Fucken’ nope.

At this point I’ll explain that I know a bit about the truth claims featured here. For instance, I happen to work for the NDIA. You won’t hear much more about that from me because I observe some strict rules about the separation of church and state when it comes to disclosing information about my job or other people’s information in a comedy context. But you can be assured that I know enough to fact-check truth-claims about the NDIS.

I mention this because I’ve heard bullshit about the NDIS from no less than four comedians in the last fortnight. All of the “red-pilled” edgelords seem to be talking shit about the NDIS at the moment, with one of them recently telling me he thinks it’s everything wrong with Australia and also that it’s a “pyramid scheme” because some of the NDIA’s employees have disabilities.

Ummm… so does your workplace if it’s at all decent. Statistically, given the high number of Australians with disabilities, most workplaces will employ them. That’s not a fucking pyramid scheme, dipshit. Maybe learn about what a pyramid scheme is before talking about it. Maybe you shouldn’t talk shit about things you don’t know anything about. That ok with you, Dunning Kruger?

And seriously, employers refusing to hire people with disabilities is illegal. In what universe would you ever expect the NDIS to be the only employer in Australia to discriminate against people with disabilities? If you can’t be arsed to fact-check your own bullshit, maybe at least think about whether it makes any fucking sense before you embarrass yourself.

So let’s look at the truth-claims in this routine.

Can the party in power import thousands of immigrants for their gratitude-induced votes? Fuck, no. Migrants can’t vote here. You have to be an Australian Citizen, which takes years. As an immigrant, you know this so why are you fucking lying?

Can you get on the NDIS by just identifying as having a disability? Fuck, no. You fucking know this. A Current Affair have run hundreds of stories about disabled people who can’t qualify, and there’s no way you don’t watch that show, so why are you fucking lying?

When you’re on the NDIS do you get paid ten thousand dollars a week? Fuck, no. If you imagine that’s how it works, you might be a moron.

So, like I said. Not comedy and not truth.

But I’m not mentioning this to be mean. I want to talk about comedy’s relationship to the truth. Because the disingenuous act of lying, saying it’s comedy and is therefore probably true even though I’m not saying it’s the truth, is pretty common and only part of it.

In 1996 Tool dedicated their Aenima album to Bill Hicks, describing him as a truth-teller. Hicks is often referred to as a truth-teller, actually. There’s a whole school of thought that comedians are truth-tellers and that Bill Hicks was the greatest truth-teller of them all. George Carlin had a similar “speaks truth to power” reputation. Comics like Hicks and Carlin introduced a persistent notion that comedians are a special type of human, ones who have an inside track to what the truth is and a unique platform to express the truth in a way that nobody else in society can.

Now, without any disrespect to either of these two excellent comics (who both were highly influential to me), is there actually anything to support that notion? Or is it just a bit of reputational bullshit, like false beliefs about Pauline Hanson’s alignment with Australian values?

Let’s get some of the basics out of the way. Nobody fact checks comedy. If someone in the audience tries to correct us on a matter of fact, we’ll treat them like the worst kind of heckler – annoying and boring simultaneously. Comedy isn’t about facts. We don’t swear to tell the truth on any kind of bible before we speak, and we expect our audiences to understand that what we’re doing is fabulation.

Some of our stories might have origins in things that actually happened, but we expect to change names and other details without copping any shit over it, because we’re not presenting a documentary. We’re trying to make you laugh.

If a comic says “and then I killed them” or I describe something profound my dog told me this morning, nobody gives any consideration to the possibility it might not be true. You don’t believe it, but it’s not lying because we don’t expect you to believe it. Half the things comedians say on stage couldn’t possibly be true, and that’s OK.

So where do we get this “truth teller” idea from? Why is it a thing? Because Hicks and Carlin ranted a lot?

We comedians have a strange relationship with the truth. We insist that what we’re saying is truth, even I though we expect you not to hold us to it. What are we actually doing here? I have a theory.

I suspect we’re trying to get at truth, attempting to uncover some kind of truth through a process of interrogating it and applying bizarre hypothetical thought experiments, just as Socrates did. I don’t see us as being gifted with special knowledge that we preach to the world. I think we’re more like weird philosophers using counterintuitive techniques to identify bullshit and hopefully reveal something true beneath it.

I think that’s cool, but I think we’re on very dangerous ground when we assume what we’re doing is presenting the truth just because we agree with our own material. We might be on a mission to expose truth, but we’re not particularly qualified purveyors of it. People should think twice before listening to Bill Hicks’s claims about the virtues of smoking and maybe look at the actual evidence (spoiler alert – died of cancer at 32) instead.

There’s something disingenuous about comedians presenting ideas as fact. Joe Rogan can (and does) spread a ton of misinformation on his massively influential platform – getting a shitty crooked President elected, encouraging people not to get vaccinated during a global pandemic, doing some kind of kayfabe bullshit with the director of the FBI to push false narratives about the Epstein Files and the Trump/Russia scandal – and then hide behind the stock “You shouldn’t listen to me. I’m just a comedian” speech that he pulls out when he’s called on it.

Inexplicably, people do listen, though, and he knows it. My theory is that, after his last special, nobody believes he’s still a comedian anymore.

The idea behind the speech is valid though. You shouldn’t listen to us. We’re just comedians. If we reveal something true in what we do it’s not because we’re truth-tellers. It’s because we’re truth-seekers.

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